The US economy employed 911,000 fewer people than originally reported as of March 2025, providing stark new evidence the labor market was downshifting long before this summer.

The backwards-facing data came in well above the expectations of many economists who had estimated that these revisions would be hundreds of thousands of jobs lower.

The data covers the period from March 2024 to March 2025 and trims the average monthly jobs gains seen during this period (roughly the last 10 months of Joe Biden's presidency and the first two months of Trump's) from a monthly average of 147,000 to about 71,000.

It also marks another larger-than-average downward revision and could provide new fuel for critics of the government's data collection process.

Tuesday release represents a decline of 0.6 percent — well above the revisions that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) says have averaged 0.2 percent over the last decade.

The report, released Tuesday morning, showed the largest downward revisions were to leisure and hospitality, which saw 176,000 fewer jobs than previously thought. Professional and business services industry were second, with a downward revision of 158,000 jobs.

The revisions are almost entirely in the private sector, showing 880,00 fewer jobs there as well as 31,000 fewer government jobs.

Final revised numbers for this period are not set to be released until February 2026.

Jobs revisions are a routine practice where the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and other government agencies update their estimates of jobs levels as more data — such as quarterly insurance tax filings — becomes available.

But job revisions have consistently been above average in recent years and have become a political flashpoint, especially since last year’s preliminary annual revisions landed in the middle of the presidential campaign and showed the US economy employed 818,000 fewer people than previously thought.

The median estimate among economists compiled by Bloomberg as of Monday afternoon was for a decline of around 700,000 jobs. One of the highest estimates was an Oxford Economics suggestion that that headline revision number could be 900,000.

It ultimately was above even that.

The political heat has only increased in recent months after Trump reacted to a monthly jobs report by accusing the BLS, without evidence, of having "phony" numbers and then firing the agency's commissioner.

Trump's pick for a new commissioner, E.J. Antoni of the Heritage Foundation, is expected to have a confirmation hearing before the Senate's labor-focused panel in the coming months.

Antoni has proved to be a polarizing pick as Trump aims to put one the agency's fiercest critics in charge or data collection going forward. Both Antoni and various Trump aides have seized upon larger-than-normal revisions seen in recent years to argue that new approaches to data are needed.

Tuesday's release is likely to increase those calls.

The data could be used as fodder by the White House to try and shift blame for the current slowdown towards Biden or Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

In short: the Trump administration could point to the revisions as evidence to say that the economy was weakening long before inauguration day — and that Powell has been “too late.”

The "too late" charge was one that Trump has repeated lobbed and even repeated Tuesday morning with a social media post before the number was released that quoting a market analyst saying Powell should have begun cuts in 2021 and that the 2% inflation target is “too rigid.”

Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.

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